4 out of 5

This series should absolutely fall flat on its face.  It doesn’t – and it comes out way ahead, actually – due to, funny enough, its narrational incompetence.

A late 90s / mid 00s French publication later picked up by Marvel (if you’re wondering how and why Joe Quesada has a quote on the front cover), the detailed and restrained artwork and square word bubbles will be recognizable to any readers of Humanoids or Metal Hurlant translation, or European comics in general.  As will the stumbling translation, for better or worse.  The editor and letterer or part of the Titan Comics staff, so I’ll assume translator Virginie Selavy is as well, which means, on the one hand, we’re up to Titan standards in that this isn’t just a straight republishing of the Marvel editions.  And to be sure, translation is not a straight one-to-one shot, especially with the religious rhetoric and heavy sci-fi concepts at play here.  But the stiffness in the way people speak is a hallmark of this kinda stuff – a lack of localization – and it very much relegates the reading to a slightly more confined genre: it gives it a reading curve, so that you sort of have to want to read this to read it.  Despite the awesomeness of the story, those jumbly sentences might be a barrier to entry for non-comic readers.  And surprisingly, given those Titan standards I mention – and owning a good chunk of their recent output, I do consider this a general mark of quality – the editing flubs a’plenty as well, especially later in the collection where words are swapped in sentences or just outright misused.  Again with the caveat, that I realize this is a daunting task, but unfortunately, for all the effort that presumably goes into it, only your mistakes are going to be noticed by fat, slobbering online reviewer types like me.

This isn’t the incompetence, though.  No, that’s on Bajram.  Bajram, who takes about two hundred pages to even give us an inkling of where this Universal War is; Bajram, who barely gives us context for what we’re reading.  UWO is written completely backwards.  Or at least, in the way we’re taught to absorb stories of this nature, future-based tales of space exploration with new governments and new colonies.  Ground rules are to be established; grounding characters used to define the world and then introduce a problem.  Heroes emerge, clear trajectories mapped.  But none of that happens here.  We get a large group of stragglers to start with – the ‘purgatory squad,’ criminals who’ve been re-purposed for a space squadron for the United Earth Forces – who already know each other and who aren’t written as characters but more as one-word concepts – and who are seemingly dispatched from the story on a whim.  There’s a big blank void in space the UEF are trying to penetrate, and we pick up on this mission halfway through.  Who are the UEF?  Who are the ICC the UEF fear are behind this big blank void?  …We’re not told.  …When Bajram introduces time travel into the mix, cautious sci-fiers are rolling their eyes at the paradoxes to come, but this is actually what ends up saving the story from obliqueness: it’s very much science first, story second, but by getting us used to the front-loaded build-up of characters and setting, instead of having to ‘prove’ the science through ridiculous over-explanations, we’re prepared to accept it in the way we’ve learned to accept the rest.  UWO is incredibly confident in its logic, to the extent that it almost lampshades it by pointing out the flaws, but even this works in the way it’s processed by its characters.  It’s not lampshading, it’s a logical acceptance of What Is.

Continuing on this, the 200 pages it takes Bajram to more fully elucidate What Is end of making complete structural sense.  Doing it the opposite way would have made the reveals feel cheaper.  Instead, we get to appreciate them at the pace at which they’re doled out, without the story-defeating effect of “guessing” what’s going on before it occurs.  I still would consider this incompetence, just fortunate incompetence because I don’t get the impression it was purposeful.  Again, the characters are broad strokes – the work here was put into figuring out how this world and science works, and the believability that results from those efforts buoys the one-dimensional cast into a group you’re happy to follow into space and time.

There’s a second volume of this to come, which is a little troubling given how complete the story is.  Titan, missteps above aside, did their usual bang-up job on the collection, with wonderful production values and perfect binding that’s light and easy to hold but feels solid and can lay flat for easy reading.  There are some lettering oddities where one characters word bubbles will be spread strangely about a panel and some odd timing jumps in storytelling (not with the time travel, just approaching one moment from two perspectives at two different times), but the book is otherwise incredibly easy on the eyes – no small feat when trying to illustrate some of the more out-there concepts contained within – and the story flows joyfully.  Any sci-fi fan should be made happy by this, an effective time travel tale, assuming they’re down with the minor difficulties that come from reading a translated text.